TriadCareers.com

Pediatric ICU is 'a learning experience'

A stay in the hospital can sometimes be a matter of life and death, an especially harsh reality when the patient is a young child.

"I expect an 85-year-old grandmother to be sick, and to be in the hospital, and to maybe even pass away, because that's the natural course of life," said Leslie Butcher. "You don't expect your four-month-old son or daughter to have some acute, life-threatening — or even a chronic life-threatening — condition and have to say goodbye to them before their time."

It's a reality Butcher, 30, has learned to deal with as a staff registered nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at Brenner Children's Hospital in Winston-Salem. But not everyone can stomach the work.

"I think that's definitely the hardest part of doing what we do on a daily basis, are those bad cases where you can't help a child get better, for whatever reason," she said. "That's the worst part, the most difficult to deal with, and the biggest reason that people leave the unit that I work in."

But the Thomasville native enjoys the variety of experiences as a PICU nurse, and finds rewards in helping families during especially trying times.

"We have this child in bed that we're continuously sitting on top of and watching and making sure that things are going the right way," she said. "But you have a family that's sitting up there that you have to tend to, as well. So lots of our role here is taking care of the patient, but also making sure that the parents are being treated, too."

Her coworkers recognize her as someone special, says her husband, Chris Butcher, who nominated her as an extraordinary nurse.

"I call her the Michael Jordan of nursing," Chris Butcher wrote. "I have been told by her peers that if their child were in the PICU, they would handpick Leslie as their nurse."

Butcher earned her nursing degree from UNCG in 2002, blazing her own trail.

"I'm really the first in my family to go down this road, of immediate family members," she said. "In high school I thought the human body was fascinating, I loved the biology courses, and just thought that would probably be the best route for me to go down."

She has never stopped learning. "Every day that I come to work I take it as a learning experience, and I know now, seven years later, that nursing school is just opening a door," Butcher said. "They give you the core material that you need, and then you grow on that every day."